An Analysis of the Thomas Kinkade Calendar for May and June

Well, this is awkward. But
before we start, let me say: R.I.P. Thomas Kinkade, who died last
month. While
all of the circumstances surrounding his later life and sudden
death may never be fully known to the public, it’s clear that he
was carrying some demons in addition to his talent and ambition.
It’s also clear that his painting had become an effective way to
mask those demons. Thomas Kinkade the Message was supposed to be
the proxy for Thomas Kinkade the Man, but Thomas Kinkade the
Marketer overruled them both. But while he’s gone, his monthly
calendar is still a thing, and so, yes, this column is still a
thing.

May and June are similar months, thematically: they’re about
commerce. It’s interesting, whenever Kinkade “shares the light of
faith and hope” he goes all gauzy and superficial, but he’s
remarkably direct when it comes to painting a scene of business. So
here we have San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and Carmel’s Ocean
Avenue, and in both we have the typical just-after-a-gentle-rain
shimmer and the “golden
hour” pre-sunset sky (one looks like it has been copied and
pasted from the other), but your eyes are mainly directed to what
could be called “sharing the blazing light of retail.” Will we ever
discover that ConEdison or Pacific Gas & Electric were his
investors? Many of the stores bear the names of his family members,
his wife Nanette (also NK and NANSK) and daughters Merritt and
Chandler, and in both paintings we see—wait for it—a Thomas Kinkade
retail store. Why, we never knew! It must have crossed Kinkade’s
mind to create an infinity mirror effect, depicting his Carmel
gallery pictured in a Carmel street scene hanging on the wall
inside the Carmel gallery, and on and on. It’s likely that the
bristles were not small enough, not that the ambition was not big
enough.

To top it off we also see a
man intended to be Kinkade himself doing “plein air” painting, as
well as the name of the company he founded, MAGI (Media Arts Group,
Inc.). Can we say the demons are in the details? There’s a theory
that
Jackson Pollock cleverly disguised his full name inside
“Mural,” one of his essential paintings, highlighting the notion
that behind the wild abstraction there is still a conventional
structure to his work. To me, the gesture seems dubious at best,
but the link between our “humble” illuminator of light and the man
whom
he condemned as creating a “culture of chaos” is interesting.
Chaos is as chaos does, right? Even Michelangelo, who famously
carved
his name across Mary’s sash so that everybody would know the
Pietá was his work, didn’t write “check out my other work” or “I’m
available for commissions!” Commerce is as commerce does. The
spotlight of self-promotion shines above Kinkade’s fuzzy landscapes
like the Bat-Signal. It’s the thing that grounds his work squarely
in the modern era he claimed to detest.

Speaking of commerce, the choice of Fisherman’s Wharf is an apt
one as a metaphor for Kinkade. Economic and technological changes
have meant that the wharf is no longer a hub for fleets of fishing
boats, but is a lovely tourist magnet with romanticized remnants of
bygone eras. Sound familiar? When you order fresh fish at a
restaurant, you may get either freshly caught fish or, wink-wink,
freshly defrosted fish. But it’s, you know, fresh enough. Kind of
like how a mass-produced canvas print of a Kinkade painting, if
dabbled on by a “master
highlighter,” can still be considered an original, or at least
original enough.

And I may be wrong, but I think I noticed an error in the wharf
painting as well. There is a boat in the middle that appears to not
have its lights turned on. What happened? Is there a dark subplot
here? Are there teens playing strip poker inside? Is this the home
of the scoundrel who removed all the humans from the painting? Did
Kinkade run out of the color 80-Watt Fluorescent? Disappointingly,
this is only oversight and not intrigue. We know that in Kinkade’s
fantasy world the light, whatever it meant, had to be coming out of
everything and everywhere all at the same time. He never was able
to break out of that world. Maybe the more apt metaphor is not
Fisherman’s Wharf, but Alcatraz.